Reflection On Reading And Writing

Reading and writing is a skill that many people begin to develop as a small child, from a time before they can even remember. As adults it seems so effortless to read and write, until you compare the style of writing from a child’s story to that of a scholarly article. If you look closer you see that there are many differences including sentence structure, terminology, and format. When you step into the academic world of college, you begin to see that writing can take many differing forms depending on what field you enter. For example, Humanities accepts qualitative data, and cares about what the individual thought, said and did. Oppositely, science wants quantitative data full of facts and figures that show definitive evidence for why something occurs the way it does. This shows a massive difference in the required level of writing and

After taking ENG 101 I see where these points definitely should have played a more important role in my writing process, but unfortunately did not. First of all, I was never good at creating a physical outline of points I wanted to make during my paper, instead preferring to free write based off of a mental outline consisting of different topics I knew I wanted to address. When we had to start writing longer papers, where a single paragraph needed to be about a page long, I found that it was a difficult adjustment to make because I felt I was rambling on, when I actually prefer to be short and to the point. Reading “Porter’s notes on writing process” and “Porter’s notes on paragraphing” was very helpful and showed me why I needed to direct a lot more attention to the planning stage, instead of just starting to write. If you plan an essay out ahead of time, then you just have to build on your preexisting ideas. This makes the actual drafting phase quicker because you do not have to come up with ideas and explain them at the same